Shouty Kilmer says hydrogen cars are the future.

[oil pan 4]

Electric cars with 50 to 75 kwh batteries will likley put an end to the hydrogen car.

There's nothing wrong with fuel cells. I like fuel cells. They can also run off other fuels but they are not as efficient and require a lot more warm up.
But being able to fuel your car up with methanol would be a lot more appealing than hydrogen.
They wouldn't do real great up north.

[ProDigit]

Personally, I think, unless we re-invent the gasoline engine, hydrogen is out of the question.
I watched Mr Shouty's vid, and couldn't agree less with it.

A while back, there was big research done on alternate engine types, like the Duke engine, or the wave disc engine.
While the duke runs very nice, it's longevity is been questioned, since it has rotating cylinders that would most definitely cause centrifugal wear.
The wave disc engine, while it can't be used in variable speed scenarios, would make an excellent driver for a generator at a fixed load!

The wave disc engine would be much more efficient than even a rotary engine; if the rotary engine was only still manufactured today!

There is a future for the wave disc engine in generators, due to it's small size, high efficiency, low weight, simplicity and low cost.
And we all know generators have a future in electric cars.

Perhaps a wave disc engine would go well with a CVT, varying the output speed at a fixed input rotation.

Anyway, fuel cell is out of the question for the future.
And Electric is an emerging market, but research has determined we already are running at ~96% efficiency on lithium batteries.
Chances are very low we will find alternate forms of storage that would improve on Lithium.
We all know that electric cars cost about 1/3rd too much. They're only good for Europe, where gasoline costs 3x as much as here in USA.

Research indicated (youtube), that in the UK, and with $10/gal of fuel cost, an electric car would get out of the initial cost within 50k miles.
In usa, this is well over 150k miles, or the lifetime of the vehicle.

And about 400k miles, if you need to purchase a new battery from the dealership, as for the price of a new battery, you can easily get a new 4 cylinder car ($20-26k).

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by ProDigit

Personally, I think, unless we re-invent the gasoline engine, hydrogen is out of the question.

Not even if we reinvent the engine, since the main problem is hydrogen storage. Remember those BMW prototypes with a regular engine converted to hydrogen?

There is a future for the wave disc engine in generators, due to it's small size, high efficiency, low weight, simplicity and low cost.
And we all know generators have a future in electric cars.

Perhaps a wave disc engine would go well with a CVT, varying the output speed at a fixed input rotation.

For a fixed-load operation, gas turbines might be a more realistic approach instead of those, let's say, "unconventional" engine designs.

[redpoint5]

It seems Shouty is stuck in the early 90's. Maybe he's like me and never got around to reading issues of Popular Mechanics when he got them, and is just now catching up. Will be interesting to see what his videos look like when he breaks into the year 2000's magazines.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

I didn't really care about hydrogen-powered cars until some 20 years ago when the mainstream media was highlighting fuel cells, and some 15 years ago I still believed someday a hydrogen-fed fuel cell would become an effectively viable replacement for reciprocating engines on cars. Nowadays even if hydrogen had a remote possibility of going mainstream, I'd rather bet on 3D-printed ceramic microturbines over fuel cells.

[seifrob]

I cannot find any reference online, but in early 90's there was quite huge effort of using hydrogene in cars. Mercedes,iirc, with some other german tech companies, were running a kind of pilot project on ? Berlin airport? . Passenger buses, fuelling stations, logistics. There was a lot of hype around when they started. The project was abandoned silently few years later, but not becuse of fuel cells. Additional expenses l think. All the losses in transport, storage, "gas station" equipment costs orders of magnitude more than hose and funnel, ersonnel salary as you cannot let average Joe handle sub-zero pressurized nightmare.
All this made hydrogene cost prohibitive for average-sized "gas station" even befor the hydrogen could actually move a car ( save pathetic effeciency of fuel cells of that time).

[RustyLugNut]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Electric cars with 50 to 75 kwh batteries will likley put an end to the hydrogen car.

There's nothing wrong with fuel cells. I like fuel cells. They can also run off other fuels but they are not as efficient and require a lot more warm up.
But being able to fuel your car up with methanol would be a lot more appealing than hydrogen.
They wouldn't do real great up north.

Store excess electrical energy as hydrogen bonded to a carbon or two.

The inefficiencies are only acceptable if you have unused excess, of course.

[ProDigit]

There currently are some research being done, in solid state batteries.
The research is promising, so far.

Also, Super capacitors will help a lot in electric cars.
Instead of limited to 200-240V batteries, super capacitors have internal voltages of thousands of volts.
They store the power into a large array of caps; meaning, they can suck a lot more power out of those DC fast chargers; and 'technically' charge a battery in a matter of minutes.
What they do is store the extra power in the caps while charging the battery.
if you unplug the car, the super caps will provide the electric motor for power, while charging the batteries.

In other words, those super caps capture energy very rapidly, while releasing them slowly. They also are great buffer banks for regenerative braking, as even with a full battery, they can always store more energy (the DC circuit will just increase the charge voltage over the caps).

The con is that supercapacitor banks contain high energy, but offer a very low range. Meaning, Li Battery packs can become smaller, lighter (as capacitors are lighter than Li batteries), and fast charging them will be faster too.

These, next to silicon batteries are the only research being done today.
Silicon batteries are a great alternative, but only good for temporal solutions.
They can contain much larger energy densities as Lithium, but because silicon expands so much, it's crystalline structure also will be more prone to wearing out.
They definitely are cheaper to make, and I can see a market for it in the CHinese products, where quick money schemes make more sense than durability.

[redpoint5]

The latest supercapacitors on the market are not capable of thousands of volts. In fact, they have a very low voltage capability closer to 2.5-2.8v. Furthermore, combining them in series to boost voltage severely reduces overall capacitance.

They are able to be both charged and discharged extremely rapidly since they operate on static electricity rather than chemistry. There's no point in charging a supercap rapidly and then slowly charging a battery, since you could simply store the energy in the supercap and forego the losses associated with chemically charging a battery.

I'm not holding my breath on "solid state" batteries because the current ones have pathetic storage per volume and cost a fortune. The technology would need to get thousands of times better while not increasing price by much.

... and there are plenty of battery technologies being researched besides solid state and silicon. I have a buddy that studies lithium-ion chemistry, for example.

[ProDigit]

Redpoint,
You're right, and I was wrong.

Supercaps indeed have multiple caps that can charge up to only a few volts.
But because they are in Parallel (I never mentioned they were in series), they can generate massive amps instead of voltages.
While the voltages are low, hundreds of caps can easily suck up thousands of amps momentarily.

Not always will the energy in caps be used for driving.
A car might be charging, then gets unplugged. The remaining energy in the caps can be used to charge the battery when the car isn't driving.
That way, when you plug it in again, it again can draw large currents off the net.

The initial technology was invented in Belgium, my home country, the idea was initially to fast charge the cap, which then slowly charges the battery for smaller devices like Cellphones (or a Roomba or so).
Think about dropping your phone down for a charge and in 10 seconds it has enough charge to last a day?

Supercapacitors for cars are now being manufactured in Iceland.
But I agree with your statement that this technology makes no sense for 120/240V chargers; and only the DC fast chargers in cars.
Who knows, in the future we might have 6000V fast chargers? It would be beneficial for the electric companies, since a lot of their high-voltage lines are rated at 6kV, and you could use only 1 lead to charge the car (since it's AC); a lead, and ground the car, or 2 leads.